Reading/writing to a client-side USB device from ASP.NET

I currently have an ASP.NET web application written in C#, and I need to be able to communicate with a device that's hooked into a USB port on the client side (reading and writing). I was looking into adding a web service that would work with a Silverlight application that would handle 开发者_如何学Gothe local hardware communication, but apparently that type of access only works for an "out of browser" SL app.

Are there any other technologies that would integrate nicely into an ASP.NET application that might support this type of thing? I'll need to support Windows XP+ on the client side. I'm really looking for something that's "browser centric" here (avoiding things like sleeper exe's, if possible) and will be easy for the user to install/allow (as I'm sure they'll need to explicitly allow something of that nature being read).

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We used to do this with the (old) ActiveX technology (in Internet Explorer only) using an ActiveX Control which the user has to agree to actively (but it's simple).

Java applets are another option. But the scope of ASP.NET definitely has to be left.